Implanting the better instincts of civilisation’? Black South Africans and Shakespeare in Victorian Grahamstown

Abstract

Recent Shakespearean celebrations have highlighted the connection with South Africa, particularly in the form of the iconic ‘Robben Island Bible’, the volume of Shakespeare's collected works in which political prisoners on Robben Island marked their favourite quotations. This provides my starting point for an investigation into the historical origins of black South African engagement with Shakespeare. I present new evidence on the first recorded performances of Shakespeare by black South Africans – at the Anglican ‘Kafir Institution’ in Grahamstown (Eastern Cape) in the 1860s and 1870s. I see this as not so much a consequence of the inevitable spread of Shakespeare from the metropolitan centre to the far reaches of empire but as arising from a particular conjunction of individuals, ideologies and circumstances, a Shakespeare more chosen than imposed. I conclude by pointing to parallels between the mid-Victorian ‘civilizing mission’, central to the episode, and some contemporary...